Nice one, Lars, Great trick to get the hang of, not easy at all at the beginning! I think you'd say Lighthouse > Trade Spike or Lighthouse > Swap Spike, even though in this case it's pretty obvious how you get from LH to Spike. Somehow just become a common term. I mean, nobody says Lighthouse Trade Base Cup... The world of kendama nomenclature is an odd place.

Today I didn't play kendama, but I snuck a favourite old ken into a friend's luggage after she'd been staying an afternoon with me in Berlin. Let's hope she'll appear on the forum!

Haha I have! Today I got to my grandparents lake house and played kendama for probably 2 hours. I practiced some spacewalks and hand rolls (still trying to figure out how to grab the ken right after the handroll). I also worked on my lunars and got lunar maybe 20 times. There was one instance where I got it twice in a row! So my consistency on that has gotten better I finished the day off doing an airplane with almost no light haha. Overall a great kendama day for me.

Today I played for around 5 hours. I would have kept playing but my shoulder started to get sore so I stopped. I got pretty close to getting stilts, and I worked on getting more consistent with airplanes, jsticks, and swing-ins. Lots of kendama!

Hey Donald, that's an absolutely bonkers trick with the Reverse Gunslinger, hope you were happy with it.

Today the Berlin crew entertained KROM HQ's Rolf S, Ganer, the Copenhagen big-hitter and long-time KROMIE. I didn't know much about him before today but I continue to be impressed by the KROM Kendamalove. We met on the street and Rolf showed off some serious Copenhagen freestyle trick lines (smooth diving Moon Circle into Swirl into Pinwheel into slapped Butterfly stuff to make your mind boggle).

Then we took to the park and played some games of Follow, and Rolf insisted we keep the tricks simple and just go for long lines. It was so great to be battling him with a ten, twenty trick long Follow line, just completely focussed on consistency. He showed our little team what it means to 'make everything count', as Eelco recently put it, referring to a different KROMIE. To be honest our team didn't hold up well to this sustained barrage of the most simple of tricks in the book, but I was trying my damndest, and really let things get flowy and smooth in that Danish way.

After that we bashed out a few rounds of Points in the subway, Rolf taking almost everything home and even doing several flawless rounds (5x Slip-On Stick at high speed was particularly beautiful), before discussing tricks and showing variations, at which point he was even more involved than ever, completely blown away by the tiniest differences and seeing possibilities open up he'd not yet thought about. Some of these he insisted filming for Instagram, and he seemed genuinely elated when the tricks were finally landed on film.

I know this isn't usually the place for longer posts, but I just thought some of you might appreciate, as we did today, this instance of real kendama spirit. If you ever have a Rolf in your country, get hold of him and have an hour or two of kendama with him, you'll learn a lot, and I don't just mean tricks.

Today I played at Merrion Sq. I traded a Kendama with @Kendogma and be both raced the STB and both landed it in less than 1:20.We also played "chained tricks" and loved the format (not sure how TMO called it). We went for long combinations of easy tricks, so much fun.